If you’re looking for a way to keep your brain in tip top condition, consider writing in cursive.

Terre Haute, writes at Pal-Item:

Another view: Twists and turns of writing by hand

Those of a certain age can still see, in the classrooms of their minds, those oh-so-exact, even ornate, examples of proper handwriting displayed across the tops of chalkboards.

It’s called cursive now, but mostly then it was just called writing, as opposed to hand printing. Both writing and printing were taught and practiced painstakingly, over and over, until the pupil reached at least an approximation of that irritating best-student-in-class’ letter-perfect work.

That ancient art of legible handwriting — letters joined together in a continuous chain of swirls and strokes — is no longer a required part of the Hoosier classroom. Since 2011, it has been optional, while keyboarding is required. Keyboarding, of course, should be required in an age of mobile devices and computers, but so again should cursive.

State Sen. Jean Leising of Oldenburg has succeeded in getting a bill passed in the Indiana Senate that would require “each school corporation and accredited nonpublic elementary school to include cursive writing.” That bill passed the full Senate 39-11. And now the bill goes on the House, where Rep. Bob Behning, the chairman of the House Education Committee, may try to block the measure from being heard. He has done so before; this is Leising’s fourth try.

The idea deserves a fair hearing in the House — but then again, that’s an idealistic view of matters at the Statehouse that seem to be influenced far more by special interests and lobbyists’ money than by common sense for what’s best for Indiana’s citizens.

The desire to return to cursive is not just a “Little House on the Prairie” wish by fossilized minds for a time that was simpler. Emerging are several reasons to believe — who knew? — that learning cursive is educational. Just days old is a commentary titled “Ten reasons people still need cursive” on the website of the Federalist, a pretty conservative looking operation. Among its arguments is this, presented by William Klemm, Ph.D., senior professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University: “Cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate visual and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity,” he writes in the magazine Psychology Today. “School systems, driven by ill-informed ideologues and federal mandate, are becoming obsessed with testing knowledge at the expense of training kids to develop better capacity for acquiring knowledge.”